In reconstructing
his alternative to the Autobiography, Marable
discovered details about Malcolm's life that some
admirers will find disturbing. Building on the research
of Bruce Perry, Marable describes a sexual relationship
between Malcolm and a wealthy white man named William
Paul Lennon. He also shows that Malcolm developed a
condescending and often abusive attitude toward women,
culminating in a marriage that was motivated less by
romance and mutual respect than the desire to conform to
the Nation of Islam's standards of respectability.
Revelations about Malcolm's private life elicited a
scathing review from Karl Evanzz, who has written
extensively on Malcolm X and the Nation of Islam, and
Malcolm X's daughters, Ilyasah and Malaak Shabazz, have
denounced Marable's account as incompatible with their
own memories of their parents' relationship.

Malcolm's daughters
admit that they did not read Marable's book and [Karl] Evanzz
bases his critique on contrary evidence in the "far
superior" Autobiography, so it would be
unfortunate if readers allowed their criticism to
detract from the broader interpretive arc of the new
biography. Historians have enriched our understanding of
the non-violent civil rights movement by examining its
origins in the social democratic radicalism of the 1930s
and 1940s, but recent studies continue to locate the
"roots of Black Power" squarely in the decades following
the Second World War. This is a valuable corrective to
an older tendency to treat Black Power as a misguided
departure from the non-violent tradition, but it
overlooks the even deeper links between postwar
activists and the Black Nationalism of the early
twentieth century. More than any other scholar, Marable
reveals the continuity of that "long Black Power
movement."

At five hundred
pages, Marable's scholarly work is not likely to
displace the Autobiography on best-seller lists
or even many college syllabi. Some readers may be
disappointed that Marable ends the book without
exploring the impact that Malcolm X had on radical
politics in the late 1960s. He shows that both black and
white activists were attracted to the Organization of
Afro-American Unity, which Malcolm X founded after
leaving the Nation of Islam, but tells us little about
how they implemented his ideas following his
assassination. Marable seems more interested in
following the lives of his murderers and their
accomplices, which is interesting but not clearly linked
to Malcolm's legacy or its meaning for readers today. He
addresses those questions in a brief epilogue, but draws
hasty and rather unconvincing parallels to contemporary
events ranging from Barack Obama's electoral victory to
the United States' relations with the Islamic world. The
contrast between this ending and the rich detail and
nuanced analysis of the early chapters suggest that
Marable's declining health may have prevented him from
giving full attention to the final stages of the
project.

Those complaints
aside, Marable has produced a definitive study of one of
the best known and yet least understood figures in late
twentieth century American politics. Some readers will
reject his attempt to move beyond the mythical image
projected by the Autobiography, but most will appreciate
his effort to humanize and historicize the man behind
the myth.

William P. Jones is an
Associate Professor of History at the University of
Wisconsin, Madison. He is writing a history of the 1963
March on Washington.

My argument is that
Malcolm’s life was not an intended self-invention
process through his agency, but a global process that
summed up the journey so many were to make from being
members of the oppressed to embracing Black
self-determination and becoming revolutionaries. This is
the dialectical materialism of social change in the late
20th century and on that basis people held, and continue
to hold, Malcolm in the highest regard and they lived,
and continue to live, the life he epitomized.

Politics

Now we come to
politics and the strategy and tactics advocated by
Malcolm X. Strategy is the long term view of how to
seize power and transform society, making clear what
forces in society can be counted on and what forces one
will have to fight. Strategy also focuses on the goals
of a struggle. Tactics are the methods used in the
day-to-day struggle in which a lot of flexibility and
innovation is needed in the tit-for-tat encounters with
the enemy and in mobilizing the masses of people.
Tactics are subordinate to strategy and can’t be equated
or else one will confuse the zigzag of the struggle with
the goal and basic plan for mobilization, organization
and victory.

On a global level,
Marable gives us a clue of how he invents his own
Malcolm X. He states: “The United Nations World
Conference Against Racism, held in Durban, South Africa
in 2001, was in many ways a fulfillment of Malcolm’s
international vision,” page 485. This is ridiculous.
Malcolm X would have condemned the Durban meeting just
as he did the 1963 March on Washington. Apparently the
writer of the epilogue of Marable’s book forgot what the
writer of Chapter 4 had written: “Black American
leaders, Malcolm now urged, must ‘hold a Bandung
Conference in Harlem,’” page 120.

Malcolm’s life was
not an intended self-invention process through his
agency, but a global process that summed up the journey
so many were to make from being members of the oppressed
to embracing Black self-determination and becoming
revolutionaries.

Durban was a
conference in which the imperialists were trying to
assert their hegemony over anti-racism and
decolonization. Bandung was a third-world gathering to
plan unity and resistance in opposition to the
imperialists. Compare Wikipedia’s descriptions of each
meeting:
World Conference Against Racism 2001 /
Bandung Conference.

Malcolm X never
believed an honest discussion could be held with
imperialists. He would have predicted what actually
happened in Durban: The U.S. imperialists blocked any
open debate in order to defend their client state,
Israel.

On Malcolm X’s
political thinking, Marable writes: “Despite his radical
rhetoric, as ‘The Ballot or the Bullet’ makes clear, the
mature Malcolm believed that African Americans could use
the electoral system and voting rights to achieve
meaningful change,” page 484. Here Marable refuses to
embrace the dialectical thinking of Malcolm X. First,
Malcolm’s thinking was grounded in the radical Black
tradition. See what Frederick Douglass wrote 100 years
earlier in an article titled “The Ballot and the
Bullet,” 1859:

“If speech alone
could have abolished slavery, the work would have been
done long ago. What we want is an anti-slavery
government in harmony with our anti-slavery speech, one
which will give effect to our words and translate them
into acts. For this, the ballot is needed, and if this
will not be heard and heeded, then the bullet. We have
had cant enough and are sick of it. When anti-slavery
laws are wanted, anti-slavery men should vote for them;
and when a slave is to be snatched from the hand of a
kidnapper, physical force is needed, and he who gives it
proves himself a more useful anti-slavery man than he
who refuses to give it, and contents himself by talking
of a ‘sword of the spirit,’” reprinted in Douglass 1950,
page 457-458.

The ballot or
bullet theme in Black radicalism is in fact a
fundamental tenet of American politics. It was part of
the ideological rationale for the American anti-colonial
war of liberation from England. It was stated in the
1776 Declaration of Independence, 235 years ago. Read
the
full text if you want to understand the tradition on
which Malcolm X stands – a radical American tradition.

Malcolm’s “Ballot
or the Bullet” speech was part of his spring 1964
offensive. It is important to be clear on the historical
context in which he was giving political leadership.
Forces that preceded and surrounded him undoubtedly
impacted his thinking:

1. The increasingly
militant struggles in the South, especially those led by
Medgar Evers after the brutal murder of Emmett Till in
1955.

2.
Robert Williams and his Monroe, North Carolina,
armed self-defense strategy as summed up in his book
“Negroes with Guns,” 1962.

4. The
Revolutionary Action Movement, a group led by Max
Stanford, who went on to influence the development of
the Black Panther Party. This was the only other
organization that Malcolm X joined.

President John F.
Kennedy was assassinated in November 1963. Vice
President and then President L.B. Johnson consolidated
his own leadership by staying the course and supporting
major civil rights legislation, so the Civil Rights Act
of 1964 was signed into law on July 2, 1964.

During the summer
of 1964, SNCC led the civil rights organizations that
had formed into a coalition called the Council of
Federated Organizations (COFO) in 1962 for a major
offensive in Mississippi. This was the Mississippi
Summer Project. Hundreds of activists poured into the
state and confronted the heart of racist state power.
The House passed the bill in February 1965, but a Senate
filibuster held it up. The Senate filibuster ended on
June 19.

Three movement
activists—Goodman, Chaney and Schwerner—were martyred by
assassination in Philadelphia, Miss., on June 21. Out of
the Mississippi Summer Project came a political party,
the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, MFDP. It was
the MFDP that brought Fannie Lou Hamer to Harlem in
1964, where she appeared on a platform with Malcolm X.

From the local
precinct level to a delegation going to the national
convention, the MFDP fought the racist party
organization that excluded Black people. The main civil
rights leaders tried to get the MFDP to accept being
seated at the convention without voice or vote. The MFDP,
with the SNCC, rejected this as a sellout. In the
meantime, the bullets kept flying . . . .

In 1965-66, the
struggle was developing. The defeat of the Watts
rebellion led to the ideological advance of the “Black
Power” slogan and the new revolutionary organization
called the Black Panther Party, followed two years later
by workers throwing up a new revolutionary force on the
factory floor called the League of Revolutionary Black
Workers. The U.S. armed forces put down major urban
rebellions and assassination of Black radical leaders
continued.

The 1964
presidential campaign brought forward the ultra-right in
the form of Barry Goldwater. By 1966, “Black Power”
emerged as a key ideological slogan. Electoral victories
led to the first major Black mayors of Cleveland, Ohio,
and Gary, Ind.

By 1968, things got
even more extreme when Alabama Gov. George Wallace, the
nation’s leading segregationist politician, ran for
president and won the Indiana primary. Richard Nixon was
elected president in 1968 and 1972, but was run out of
office in disgrace in 1974. A struggle for power was
taking place.

Malcolm X laid the
basis for understanding these events: the Senate
filibuster and racist state power, the murders and the
unity between the Klan and the government and the
emergence of Black Power in both electoral and more
militant forms as well. This was indeed the ballot and
the bullet, 20th century edition.

The analysis that
Malcolm laid out in his spring 1964 speeches amounts to
a theory of the U.S. racist, capitalist state that is
based on finding a strategy to fight against it. First,
the power of the U.S. ruling class, as based on Southern
fascism versus a Black united front; then, armed
self-defense for Black liberation as self-determination
versus that racist state power.

Marable advances an
argument that separates Malcolm from his legacy, a
legacy that was in fact us—the Black liberation
movement. But no activist in that movement who was in
motion at the time will believe his argument. It flies
in the face of our experience. . . .

Rather than give us
the Malcolm X of the Detroit speeches, the Malcolm X we
love and respect, Marable tries to cut him down to size
with unsubstantiated arguments under the guise of
humanizing Malcolm X. In summary, Marable gives us a
perspective that is outside of the Black studies
tradition in his attempt to sell books to a wide
American book-buying public.

Marable gives us a
philosophy that is mechanical and not dialectical,
idealist and not materialist. And he attempts to turn
Malcolm X into a social reformer rather than the
revolutionary that he actually was. In short, Marable
fabricates a Malcolm X who would not take militant and
revolutionary action against the global war, poverty or
degradations of today. That’s why we have to speak up:
to respect our legacy and affirm our future.

Rather than give us the Malcolm X
of the Detroit speeches, the Malcolm X we love and
respect, Marable tries to cut him down to size with
unsubstantiated arguments under the guise of humanizing
Malcolm X.

While the fury over
the challenge to Malcolm-as-demigod has been at the core
of much of the uproar, some of the initial outrage
resulted from the discussion of the possibility that
Malcolm engaged in a same-sex encounter for pay prior to
his going to prison. There are some interesting
features to this outrage. This is not the first time
that this matter has been raised. In fact, several
authors have posed this issue. As such, it would have
been highly questionable for Marable to have ignored the
matter as if it were some imaginary issue. It is
important to note that in Marable’s treatment of this
aspect of Malcolm’s life, he used both primary sources
(prison letters Malcolm wrote) as well as three
secondary sources (including memoirs from Malcolm's
nephew Rodnell Collins and his partner in crime Malcolm
"Shorty" Jarvis) to corroborate his conclusion.

Methodology,
however, is not the main issue here. What infuriates
some critics is that the possibility of Malcolm engaging
in a same-sex encounter raises questions as to his
manhood. This assumption is based on the erroneous
notion that one’s sexuality is a fixed and determined
category and that the positive aspects of
Malcolm-the-revolutionary leader are somehow invalidated
by what at one moment may have been sexual ambivalence.

The outrage
expressed by some people at this ‘revelation’ is
certainly tinged with homophobia, although I am not
assuming that all of those who have reacted negatively
to this segment of the book are automatically
homophobic. Nevertheless, both the outrage and any
homophobia associated with it does not withstand
scrutiny when challenged, as it has been by Michael Eric
Dyson, who has pointed out that the Malcolm who may have
engaged in a same-sex encounter for pay was the Malcolm
Little of the thug period. In that period he engaged in
pimping, gambling and armed robbery. For many critics
it appears to be completely acceptable that he engaged
in these assorted activities but somehow same-sex
encounters for pay are over the top.

What is shocking
about this debate is how few pages it covers in the
actual book (no more than two) and that Marable was very
careful in his conclusions. As with any historian, he
draws certain conclusions from the evidence he had but
then goes on to make an interesting point: there were
no subsequent examples or claims of either same-sex
encounters for pay or homosexual activity period. While
this should have calmed down the critics, the mere
suggestion of such activity was enough to unsettle them.

Another feature of
the criticism of MX is the allegation that it represents
an attempt to portray Malcolm as having the same
politics as Marable; liberalize Malcolm so that he is
more acceptable to a mainstream audience; or turn
Malcolm into some sort of social democrat. There is no
foundation for these arguments. The closest thing to a
legitimate issue was Marable’s poor choice of words to
describe Malcolm’s evolution toward Pan Africanism (see
below).

The final chapter
of the book refutes the critics—hands down—on this
matter of an attempt to liberalize Malcolm, etc. One
need only review that chapter and consider the points
that Marable raised. Not in order of importance, but:

1. Malcolm was not converging
with King. [We discussed this point earlier.]

2. Malcolm saw the need for a
complete restructuring of the USA in order for Black
liberation to ever be achieved.

3. Malcolm would most likely
have not been enthralled with affirmative action because
he would have been looking for more structural solutions
to our situation.

4. Malcolm would have engaged
in a certain form of electoral politics.

5. Malcolm was
trying to define his politics at the global level and
situate the African American struggle within the global
struggle against imperialism and racism.

There is nothing in
this that sounds like liberalism or social democracy.
Instead it more closely conforms to variants of
anti-imperialist politics, in particular a form of
anti-imperialist politics that was prevalent in the
global South at that time.

Some critics,
however, have raised Marable’s use of the term “race
neutral” in talking about the form of Pan Africanism and
Third World solidarity Malcolm was advancing in order to
allege that Marable was trying to water down Malcolm.
Having known Marable for more than 25 years I would
attribute this to either a poor choice of words or a
mistaken editing decision. Let’s explore, however, what
Marable was attempting to address.

There was a moment
that Malcolm himself described when, during one of his
trips, he encountered a North African revolutionary.
The North African revolutionary questioned Malcolm about
his use of the term “black nationalism.” This North
African revolutionary, being AFRICAN, was apparently
also quite light-skinned and asked Malcolm where that
put him in the context of “black nationalism”. Malcolm
did not have a clear answer for this but, towards the
end of his life appeared to have been grappling with
this issue and what it meant for how he was to
conceptualize and describe his politics.

Marable used the
term “race neutral” to describe a set of anti-racist
politics that were Pan African and Third Worldist, not
in the sense that liberals or the right use the term
‘race neutral.’ It would have been more akin to what
the South African movement has called “non-racial” or
“anti-racist.” He was trying to describe this as
something that was not about black as skin color but
more akin to the manner in which “black”,
terminologically, came to be used in places such as
Britain, South Africa and the Caribbean in the late
1960s and 1970s, i.e., as a political characterization
(thus, South Asians often identified as “black” in each
of those settings and did not reserve this designation
to only those of direct African descent).

What makes the
criticism of Marable so patently disingenuous is that
one need only consider the body of Marable’s works to
know that his usage of the tern “race neutral” was far
from an example of liberalism, or other such disorders.

This all leads to a
final point, i.e., that many of the criticism of MX have
little to nothing to do with the book itself; they have
to do with Manning. So, it is time to explore some of
these in order to understand additional aspects of the
temper associated with many of the responses. . . .

Marable followed
three courses. One was to make a name for himself in
the academy as an exceptional scholar. Second, he
recognized the importance of and worked at the building
a Left. He was never a Marxist-Leninist and, as such,
was not involved in the revolutionary party-building
efforts of the 1970s and 1980s. His politics were
complicated, even when he was in the Democratic
Socialists of America. In essence he was a Marxist
looking to create a mass, left-wing formation that was
thoroughly anti-racist and anti-sexist. He was
concerned with and critical of vanguard-ism, as he saw
it, among so many radicals, not only in the USA but
overseas. In fact, his book about African and Caribbean
politics goes through an important analysis of the
collapse of the Grenadian Revolution, the sources of
which involved elements of what came to be known as the
“crisis of socialism,” including but not limited to
vanguard-ism.

Marable was very
influential in the early stages of the Committees of
Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism, a formation
that resulted from a split in the Communist Party, USA.
Although Marable had never been a member of the
Communist Party, he hoped that CCDS would become a
mechanism for a Left realignment and the building of a
mass, radical, transformative project.

This was also the
same person who was at the core of initiating the Black
Radical Congress, an effort to create a front or
coalition of Black leftists ranging from left
nationalists to non-nationalist communists. If anything
could be said of Marable, it was that he approached this
in a non-sectarian manner, even where he had differences
with individuals (and groups) from other tendencies.

The final of the
three courses was Marable’s commitment to entering into
mainstream discourses from the Left. Contrary to many
leftists who are content to speak to themselves and
their small groups, Marable sought to reach out to a
broader range of the general public, from liberals on to
the Left. . . .

MX attempts to
speak to a broad audience. It is not directed at the
Black Left, though certainly many members of the Black
Left have been reading it. It seeks an audience within
Black America and beyond who are and have been trying to
understand this remarkable historical figure, Malcolm X.

Yet there is
another side to MX that relates to the strategic
differences that emerged in the BRC (noted earlier). To
some extent Marable was attempting to better understand
the strategic challenges that Malcolm confronted in
attempting to build a Black radical pole to lead the
Black Freedom Movement. The lost pages from the
Autobiography, Malcolm’s interest in electoral politics;
and, Malcolm’s embrace of Pan Africanism were not
isolated ideas or notions, but reflected an effort by
Malcolm to fashion a strategic vision and direction that
would root the Black radical movement he sought to build
within the larger currents of Black America.

His
announced intention, for instance, of supporting Civil
Rights workers in the South was a significant step taken
to build a bridge in the Black Freedom Movement. Rather
than castigating Black liberals and progressives who
followed Dr. King, by 1964 Malcolm saw a chance for his
brand of Black radicalism (with a nationalist bent,
since it is important to note that there was Black
radicalism already within the ‘King’ camp of both
similar and different bents) to directly link with and
influence other tendencies within Black America. I
believe that this is one thing that made Malcolm most
intriguing for Marable.

For a more complete
and unvarnished—yet still inspiring—version of Malcolm’s
life, there’s
Malcolm X:
A Life of Reinvention, by the
late Columbia scholar Manning Marable. It’s the product
of more than 10 years of work and draws on Malcolm’s
letters and diaries; the results of surveillance
conducted by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the
New York Police Department; and interviews with
Malcolm’s contemporaries, including Minister Louis
Farrakhan, the Nation of Islam leader, whom Marable
talked to for nine hours. Farrakhan has said that
Malcolm was like “the father I never had.”

The loudest rumor
before the book’s release was that it would shed light
on Malcolm’s secret homosexual past. When he’s a young
hustler, we find him apparently being paid to do things
with one rich, older white man, but this moment is brief
and anticlimactic and does not convey the impression
that Malcolm was bisexual. Besides, there are far more
titillating things in this book, which dives deep into
Malcolm’s sex life. Marable obtained a letter Malcolm
wrote in 1959 to Elijah Muhammad, then the leader of the
Nation of Islam, in which he complains about his wife,
Betty Shabazz: “At a time when I was going all out to
keep her satisfied (sexually), one day she told me that
we were incompatible sexually because I had never given
her any real satisfaction.” Marable describes Malcolm as
a virulent misogynist and a horribly neglectful husband
who repeatedly got his wife pregnant, perhaps to keep
her from making good on threats to cuckold him, and also
made a habit of leaving for days or months immediately
after the birth of each child.

That’s a Malcolm we
all haven’t seen before. Meanwhile, the Malcolm we do
know starts coming into view far earlier than expected,
given that he’s known for metamorphosis. Born in Omaha
in 1925, Malcolm was drilled as a child in the
principles of Marcus Garvey — nationalism, separatism,
Pan-Africanism, black pride, self-reliance, economic
self-­empowerment—by his parents, Earl and Louise
Little. Malcolm’s father was a particularly powerful
role model: a devoted Garveyite who in 1930s Michigan
stood up for what was right for black people, even in
the face of death threats, and then paid for his bravery
with a gruesome end. The apple did not fall far at all.
And as a young man working the streets of Harlem,
Malcolm came to know most of the stars of ’40s jazz and
absorbed their example, learning to use pace, tone and
space in jazz­like ways and perhaps to become a sort of
jazzman of the spoken word. “He lived the existence of
an itinerant musician,” Marable writes, “traveling
constantly from city to city, standing night after night
on the stage, manipulating his melodic tenor voice as an
instrument. He was consciously a performer, who
presented himself as the vessel for conveying the anger
and impatience the black masses felt.”

As Malcolm moved
away from the insular religiosity of the Nation of
Islam, which at the time counseled members not to vote,
and into political issues, his relationship with Elijah
Muhammad began to rupture. Many know that Muhammad’s
womanizing—the married minister fathered children with
several young women—was one cause of the break between
them, but few know how close their sexual paths ran.
Evelyn Williams, one of the most fascinating characters
in the book, fell in love with Malcolm when he was a
street hustler, then moved to Harlem and joined the
Nation after he became a minister. Malcolm proposed to
her but changed his mind days later. After he became
engaged to Betty, Williams ran screaming from the
mosque. She was soon sent to Chicago to work for
Muhammad and later had his baby.

That must have been
painful for Malcolm, but Marable does not cite
Muhammad’s womanizing as the main reason Malcolm broke
with the Nation. Instead, he points to an incident in
Los Angeles in 1962, when police officers burst into a
mosque and shot seven Nation members, killing one and
paralyzing another. Malcolm moved to create a squad that
would assassinate members of the Los Angeles Police
Department, and when Muhammad vetoed that idea, Malcolm
lost faith in him, wondering if he really cared about
his people’s lives. Right there the bond was irreparably
shattered. Later, Malcolm told Farrakhan, a protégé
turned rival, about Muhammad’s affairs, a conversation
Farrakhan said he would have to report to the minister.
This set Malcolm’s death spiral in motion.

Touré’s new book, “Who’s Afraid of
Post-Blackness? What It Means to Be Black Now,” will be
published in September.

Columbia
University, Viking Press and the estate of Manning
Marable face a potential lawsuit over assertions in
Marable’s posthumously-released biography of Malcolm X,
Malcolm X:A
Life of Reinvention.

Lawyers representing a key figure in the biography, in a
“cease and desist” letter to the publisher May 23,
challenged the characterization of Linwood Cathcart, a
Malcolm X colleague in the Nation of Islam.

The letter from Cathcart’s attorney Mark Fury threatened
legal efforts “not by any means necessary, but by all
available means at law or equity.”

In the book, Marable implicates former Nation of Islam
Minister Linward X Cathcart in the murder of Malcolm X.
Cathcart and his lawyers strongly refute the claim and
said that New York police and FBI investigators
“dismissed him as a potential suspect.”

“Your author, Manning Marable, knowingly printed false
allegations, misleading statements and made glaring
omissions that clearly defame Mr. Cathcart, injure him
and his family, and even put him and them at risk of
physical harm,” Fury wrote.

Fury said that Marable got several facts in the book
wrong, including the fact that the men shared a
girlfriend named Sharon Poole.

Marable said in the biography that Poole and Cathcart
lived together. Fury claimed that she rented an
apartment in his house for years with her husband, while
Cathcart lived there with his wife of 40 years.

Fury said his client wants the books removed from stores
and corrections made immediately.

“Therefore, please be advised that should you fail to
remove the book from shelves and make the necessary
corrections immediately, I shall seek to enjoin your
further distribution of the book and punitive damages,
not by any means necessary, but by all available means
at law or equity,” Fury wrote.

Despite these claims, Marable received many kind words
at his death. NAACP President and CEO Ben Jealous said
Marable was “one of the keenest intellects of our age to
the contemporary conversation on race in America.”

Marable’s good friend, Abdur-Rahman Muhammad, told the
AFRO that it was time that the world gave Marable “his
due” and that “a giant has fallen.”

Mr Marable argues
that the
Autobiography was more of a memoir—hence the
exaggeration of the young Malcolm’s involvement in
hard-core crime—than a solid exercise in objective fact.
Rather than rely on the
Autobiography, Mr Marable has
scoured contemporary press clippings in America, Europe
and Africa. He has benefited, too, from the recent
release to the public of hundreds of Malcolm’s letters,
photographs and texts of speeches.

Malcolm was only
one of the prominent black figures in America’s
turbulent racial politics of the early 1960s. John
Lewis, now a member of the House of Representatives, was
organising the Freedom Riders in an attempt to register
black voters in the American South; Martin Luther King
was preaching non-violence in the black quest for civil
rights; and Stokely Carmichael, one of the Freedom
Riders but soon to join the Black Panther Party, was
becoming impatient with non-violence and coining the
slogan “black power”.

It was Malcolm,
however, who appealed most to poor blacks, rural and
urban alike: “Impoverished African Americans could
admire Dr King, but Malcolm not only spoke their
language, he had lived their experiences—in foster
homes, in prisons, in unemployment lines,” writes Mr
Marable. The question was how Malcolm would use this
appeal.

He was originally
Elijah Muhammad’s favoured disciple, but his attraction
to politics did not fit with the Nation’s refusal to be
involved in the civil-rights movement. By early 1964
Malcolm had formally left the Nation. The estrangement
was both personal, thanks to the jealousy Malcolm had
provoked at the Nation’s headquarters, and ideological:
his conversion to orthodox Islam was at odds with the
heresies of the Nation (not only did Elijah Muhammad
claim to be a new prophet but the Nation’s founder,
Wallace Fard, had claimed to be the personification of
Allah).

Was the Nation
responsible for Malcolm’s murder? Its leaders denied any
link, but Louis Farrakhan, later to become the Nation’s
leader on the death of Elijah Muhammad, had declared in
December 1964 that: “Such a man as Malcolm is worthy of
death.” As Mr Marable notes: “This code phrase was a
call to arms within the sect.” The conviction of three
men from the Nation failed to silence sceptics who
suspected police and FBI complicity.

Mr Marable avoids
judgment on the assassination. Instead he examines
Malcolm’s legacy. Whereas King appeared on an American
stamp and has a national holiday in his honour, Malcolm
appeared on an Iranian stamp and has been lauded by
al-Qaeda. Mr Marable speculates on what might have been
if Malcolm had lived: “

As his social
vision expanded to include people of divergent
nationalities and racial identities, his gentle humanism
and antiracism could have become a platform for a new
kind of radical, global ethnic politics.” Maybe. Yet
some may feel that this conclusion rests more on the
author’s wishful thinking than on the reality of the
life he describes so well.

Malcolm X's ability
to capture that sentiment among blacks, combined with
his growing realization that the equally strong demand
for full equality was consistent with such a sentiment,
provided the foundation for the great majority of black
radical movements moving forward. Black feminism's break
with Malcolm X was not because of his demand for black
self-definition or black power per se; nor was it
because of the demand for full equality. Rather, the
break was with the patriarchy, misogyny and homophobia
that Marable makes clear were also essential parts of
Malcolm X's personality and politics.

Black
self-definition had several components, according to
Marable's analysis of Malcolm X's politics. One key
element was a strong, foundational Pan-Africanism that
was both cultural and political. Malcolm X's Pan-Africanism
was cultural in several senses—not the least his
insistence that blacks in the United States were
historically tied to blacks in Africa and throughout the
Diaspora.

It was political in
the sense that X saw the political fate of blacks in the
United States tied to the liberation of blacks
throughout the world, not just in theory but in
practice. Perhaps the central political component of
Malcolm X's view of black self-determination was his
insistence that blacks in the U.S. had the right to
choose their political relationship with the United
States. As Marable states, "He never abandoned the
nationalist's ideal of 'self-determination.' "

Here I think
Marable's analysis is slightly off. The black demand for
self-determination was never limited to black
nationalism in the 20th century. Early black socialist
activists such as
Hubert Harrison and
Cyril Briggs—black
communists of the Depression and World War II era—as
well as many of the black radicals of the black power
era, some traditional Marxists and others who combined
socialism with black nationalism, all supported the
demand for self-determination. Malcolm's influence in
advocating self-determination both had deeper roots and
wider influence than suggested.

In his epilogue,
Marable wonders if, with the election of Barack Obama,
blacks still (if ever) "have a separate political
destiny from their fellow white citizens" and whether
Malcolm would have to "radically redefine
self-determination and the meaning of black power in a
political environment that appeared to many to be
'post-racial'."

Do we live in a
post-racial society? I do know from survey and other
evidence that black Americans between 2009 and 2010 once
again became disillusioned with the antics of some of
their fellow white citizens in the Tea Party and
elsewhere, who often appeal to white racism while
pursuing a policy agenda that would be devastating to
the African Americans who were once Malcolm's main
constituency—the black poor in particular.

The majority of
blacks once again are pessimistic about blacks achieving
racial equality in the foreseeable future, while the
great majority of white Americans believe that racial
equality has either been achieved or is imminent. So
self-determination may or may not need to be "radically
redefined," but the need for black political power
demonstrably remains in a country where the political
disagreements, which still arise along racial cleavages,
remain so vast.

Michael Dawson
is the John D. MacArthur Professor of Political Science
at the University of Chicago; his third book on black
politics, Not in Their Lifetimes: The Future of Black
Politics, will be published this fall by the
University of Chicago Press.

Amy Goodman:—on this day
that Malcolm X would have been 86 years old, what do you
think we should understand about him?

Amiri Baraka:
Well, we should understand the impact that Malcolm
had on the whole of American society. I think that the
one problem I have with Marable’s book is Marable never
understands that the black liberation movement had the
most impact on American society—not the CP, not the DSA,
not any of these social democratic groups, but the black
liberation movement had. And it wasn’t—if it wasn’t for
the black liberation movement and people like Malcolm,
people like Martin Luther King, people like Rosa Parks,
wouldn’t be an Obama. You know, that’s the fruit of that
struggle. And to downplay—I mean, calling the Nation of
Islam a sect, or saying that Malcolm loved history, but
he wasn’t a historian, you know, these are the kind of
things that show you that it’s a class bias that Marable
had. And I’m not opposed to Marable; he was a friend of
mine. I was in his office waiting for him the day before
he died. You know what I’m saying? But he clearly
denigrates the black liberation movement.

He tries to make it
seem that the Nation of Islam, we know, killed Malcolm
X. That’s not true. The people who killed Malcolm X are
the people that had most opportunity to kill him. And
they say there’s a killer still lurking in my town,
Newark. I think we should ask the police who that is.
They are the ones in charge of that. You know, they
should—they should be the ones put on the grill for
that.

But the thing of
trying to so-called humanize Malcolm, especially by
adding these little unproven non-facts about him—see,
because I’m not worried about the charges of, you know,
homosexuality or that he, you know, had some kind of
affair with this fool Kenyatta. There is no proof of
that. That’s just speculation. Why put it in there? You
understand?

When my wife and I
got 3,000 pages from the FBI, which they claim they
didn’t have, I had to go to Allen Ginsberg’s lawyer to
get that. They charged me 10 cents apiece for the pages.
What she said, Amina said this, she said, "Well, look,
the stuff they crossed out—we need to worry about the
stuff they let you see, because it’s the stuff they let
you see that’s going to twist what you think." And then
I just pushed it aside. And I think the same thing.
Marable got those tidbits from where? FBI, CIA, New York
Police, BOSS, and people that hated him. And then they—

Amy Goodman: What do you
mean by "those tidbits"?

Amiri Baraka: Excuse
me?

Amy Goodman: What do you
mean, "those tidbits"?

Amiri Baraka: Well, all the
rumors, the unproven rumors.

Amy Goodman: About?

Amiri Baraka:
About Malcolm and Betty and those kind of things.
You know, in fact, ironically, I had written Marable a
month before that about his journal, where he quoted
this man Thomas 15X saying that he had burned down the
mosque, see? I mean, burned down Malcolm’s house in Long
Island. And I wrote, "Well, how do you know that? Why
would you quote this guy who was a professed enemy of
Malcolm? Or to tell me about Captain Joseph, who said on
television that Malcolm was Benedict Arnold?" You
understand? There’s no consistency in Marable’s
reporting, because his consciousness is somewhere else,
you see. . . .
Do you understand who you’re interviewing? See, I tell
you, I wrote a letter to Marable a month before that,
when he’s quoting Thomas 15X, the guy who accuses the
Nation of Islam of setting fire to Malcolm’s house. And
I said, “Do you think this is intelligent to quote these
people?” . . .

If you’re going to quote a lot of
people who either dislike Malcolm because he broke away
from Elijah Muhammad, or you’re going to quote the very
kind of a police force and secret police force that
actually killed him, you know, then it makes the whole
thing shaky. I’m not saying the book does not have a
reason for existing that you can accept, but I’m saying
if you’re going to make the book readable, because
you’re going to throw in some unsupportable facts about
Charles Kenyatta, who was a fool, some unsupportable
facts about Betty Shabazz, which you cannot prove, you
know, and which you’re going to just spice the book
up—he had something about Malcolm, the day before he got
murdered, went and slept with this woman—he said "might
have" slept with this woman. Now, where did "might
have"—where did that get in there? . . .

I was sitting in his office the day
before he died. I was sitting in Marable’s office the
day before he died, waiting for him. When I got home,
they told me he had died. So I’m not no enemy of
Manning’s. We worked together. I’m just saying what I
disagree with that work. You know. . . .

Well, I met Malcolm the month before
he was murdered, in the Waldorf Astoria, which was a
hotel room by Mohamed Babu. But anyway, the thing that
Malcolm impressed me with was a call for a united front.

Malcolm made a
second, longer African trip from July to November 1964,
visiting a string of countries where he met a range of
intellectuals and political figures. In Egypt, he spoke
at the oau conference and talked with Nasser; in Ghana,
he met Shirley DuBois and Maya Angelou; in Tanzania,
Abdulrahman Mohamed Babu and Julius Nyerere; in Kenya,
Oginga Odinga and Jomo Kenyatta. The international
dimension was crucial to his thinking in the final
months. In mid-December, he invited Che Guevara—in New
York for the celebrated un General Assembly speech—to
address an oaau rally; Guevara did not attend, but sent
a message of solidarity. ‘We’re living in a
revolutionary world and in a revolutionary age’, Malcolm
told the audience. He continued:

"I, for one, would
like to impress, especially upon those who call
themselves leaders, the importance of realizing the
direct connection between the struggle of the
Afro-American in this country and the struggle of our
people all over the world. As long as we think—as one of
my good brothers mentioned out of the side of his mouth
here a couple of Sundays ago—that we should get
Mississippi straightened out before we worry about the
Congo, you’ll never get Mississippi straightened out."

The fact that many
of the initial recruits to the OAAU had come from the
Nation of Islam was used by Elijah Mohammed and
Malcolm’s numerous enemies within the Nation of Islam to
depict him as a ‘traitor’. They decided to execute him,
as he knew they would. In December 1964 he came to speak
at Oxford. Afterwards, I walked him back to the Randolph
Hotel, where we sat and spoke for over an hour. On
parting I expressed the hope that we would meet again.
He shook his head: ‘I don’t think we will.’ Why? ‘I
think they’ll kill me very soon’, he said calmly. ‘Who
will kill you?’ Here he had no doubts: it would be the
Nation of Islam or the FBI, or both together. He
explained how his break with separatism and moves to
build alliances with progressive white groups made him a
dangerous figure. In February 1965, three assassins from
the Nation of Islam gunned him down at an oaau meeting
in New York. Three years later, Martin Luther King, too,
was killed soon after he broke with the Democrats and
decided to stand as an independent Presidential
candidate. And in the years that followed the FBI
systematically organized the assassinations of Black
Panther leaders and activists.

The strength of
Marable’s account is the huge amount of information he
provides. Everything is in here, but it comes at a cost,
often disrupting the narrative. Details of Malcolm’s
personal life—his unhappy marriage, his male lovers in
prison—crowd what is essentially a political biography.
The emphasis on the Nation of Islam is not totally
misplaced, but it is accorded far too much space, at the
expense of any discussion of the overall social and
political contexts, both us and global, within which
Malcolm operated. The result is seriously unbalanced:
the events that shaped his continuing intellectual
evolution—the killing of Lumumba and the ensuing crisis
in Congo; the Vietnam War; the rise of a new generation
of black and white activists in the us, of which Marable
was one—are mentioned only in passing. This is a great
pity, because in historical terms their significance far
outweighs that of the audience sizes of various Nation
of Islam meetings or the sectarian infighting which
Marable discusses at length. Marable also makes some
nonsensical comparisons between the Nation of Islam and
Shia Muslims as well as other clumsy references to Islam
that it might have been better to exclude.

Conversely, the
book might have benefited from a comparative survey of
the different sects, black and white, that proliferated
in the US in the interwar years; the Nation of Islam
were not the only game in town—Mormons, Scientologists,
Seventh Day Adventists and Jehovah’s Witnesses all
gained large followings at the time, and remain
influential now.

In an Epilogue,
Marable sums up Malcolm’s legacy, seeking to counter
‘revisionist’ ideas that in his final years he had been
‘evolving into an integrationist, liberal reformer’.
Correctly he argues that Malcolm would have had nothing
to do with affirmative action—what he sought was ‘a
fundamental restructuring of wealth and power in the
United States’. He always demanded that middle-class
blacks be accountable to the masses of poor and
working-class African Americans. Marable contrasts the
posthumous fates of Malcolm and Martin Luther King Jr:
the latter sanctified by the political establishment as
a martyr to a ‘colour-blind America’, celebrated by an
official annual holiday, while Malcolm was pilloried and
stereotyped by the mass media, albeit as ‘an icon of
black encouragement’ to African American youth. Marable
then tries to elide King with Obama, differentiating
Malcolm from both of them. This is both sad and
grotesque.

King was killed for his opposition to the
Vietnam War. He never turned his back on the plight of
African-Americans. The reason why he broke from the
Democratic Party was to unite blacks and whites against
war and for social justice. Obama’s record speaks for
itself. Malcolm would have lambasted him for escalating
the war in Afghanistan and extending it to Pakistan,
where thousands of civilians have been killed by
‘targeted’ drone attacks. He would have pilloried
Obama’s role as Wall Street’s handmaiden, even as
working-class America, black and white, suffers from
rising levels of unemployment and social deprivation.
His words at Michigan State University in 1963 are all
too applicable today, as many are coming to realize.

Marable suggests
that Obama’s election means that Malcolm’s vision would
have to be ‘radically redefined’, for a political
environment that appears to be ‘post-racial’. In that
case, Malcolm might have asked, why is it that in 2011
the number of African-Americans incarcerated in US
prisons is the same as the slave population in 1860? And
why, despite the ascent of such figures as Clarence
Thomas, Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice and Obama, do
blacks remain on the lowest rung of the social ladder?
Malcolm was not such a prisoner of the American dream as
to think that getting a dark-skinned man in the White
House need necessarily do anything to change the
fundamental structures of wealth, race and power.

Marable's book is a
near-masterpiece, detailing events that transpired
throughout Malcolm's life that were previously shrouded
in mystery. Some of the more eyebrow-raising revelations
found in
A Life of Reinvention include Malcolm's
extensive drug use prior to his conversion to Islam,
which may have included cocaine; an alleged cover-up of
the plot to assassinate Malcolm by the New York Police
Department; and that
a Newark man may have played a key role in his
slaying. But the book breathes new life into one element
in particular of Malcolm's early years—his
alleged bisexuality—which has long provided a
subtext to the gripping narrative of the civil rights
activist's life.

According to
Marable's research, Malcolm spent much of his late teens
and early 20s wending his way through a "variety of
hustles" that included work as a "steerer" where he
connected a network of prostitutes with willing johns.
That line of work led him to be linked with one Paul
Lemmon, a well-to-do Boston resident that may have been
one of Malcolm's sexual conquests.

It should be said
outright that this area of Malcolm's life is neither new
nor novel. Speculation about his sexuality soared after
the publication of a 1992 book, Malcolm: The Life of
a Man Who Changed Black America. The novel's author,
Bruce Perry, alleges Malcolm had sporadic same-sex
encounters throughout his hustling years, claims which
have yet to be independently verified. However,
Marable's scholarly research in
A Life of Reinvention
discounts the idea that Malcolm was a practicing
bisexual. The rather amorphous claim, based exclusively
on Malcolm's employment by Lennon as his personal
butler, barely takes up one full page of the 600-plus
behemoth. The professor even goes out of his way to
explain that there was "no evidence from his prison
record in Massachusetts or from his personal life after
1952 that he was actively homosexual."

For someone who was
less than athletic in his adolescence, Malcolm X cut an
imposing figure when he reached adulthood. Such was his
raw power that none other than the Nation of Islam's
firebrand Louis Farrakhan, upon encountering Malcolm for
the first time in 1954, was quoted in Marable's book as
saying the fallen civil rights hero could be so
intimidating "I was scared of him." Malcolm X's
unapologetic message of black self-actualization gets
lost in historical accounts of his often strident
rhetoric, but without question much of his mystique lay
in his preternatural poise and unquestioned masculinity.

All the more reason
why posthumous conjecture about Malcolm's sexual
orientation is spurious at best, and utterly irrelevant
at its worst.
A Life of Reinvention makes clear
that Malcolm's relationship with Lennon was limited at
best: on its face the arrangement appeared much more
financial than romantic. Much of the available
literature about his life makes clear that Malcolm's
early years were a blur of dissolute behavior and
endless hustles that he probably regretted with age.
Upon his release from prison, Malcolm devoted himself
full-bore to civil rights activism and religious
conversion. No verifiable claims of male liaisons have
surfaced since.

The possibility of
Malcolm X's bisexuality begs the obvious question: so
what? In the current environment, there seems to be a
prurient temptation to refract the legacies of
historical figures through a prism of modern-day sexual
mores. Such notions, however, are devoid of the
necessary context. Although his biography can polarize,
Malcolm continues to be a world-bestriding historical
figure, and by all accounts was a devoted husband and
father. The example that he set, as a family man and a
person of deeply held principle, is one that can be
emulated by anyone, regardless of their race, creed or
sexuality.

Who taught you to
hate the texture of your hair? Who taught you to hate
the color of your skin? Who taught you to hate the shape
of your nose and the shape of your lips? Who taught you
to hate yourself from the top of your head to the soles
of your feet? Who taught you to hate your own kind?

The implicit jab was not at some
specific white person, but at a systemic force that
compelled black people toward self-loathing. To my
mother, a poor black girl, Malcolm X said, “It’s okay.
And you’re okay.” To embrace Malcolm X was to be okay,
it was to be relieved of the mythical curse of Ham, and
reborn as a full human being.

Virtually all of black America has
been, in some shape or form, touched by that rebirth.
Before Malcolm X, the very handle we now embrace—black—was
an insult. We were coloreds or Negroes, and to call
someone “black” was to invite a fistfight. But Malcolm
remade the menace inherent in that name into something
mystical—Black Power; Black Is Beautiful;
It’s a black thing, you wouldn’t understand.

Hip-hop, with its focus on the
assertion of self, the freedom to be who you are, and
entrepreneurship, is an obvious child of black
consciousness. One of the most popular music forms
today, it is also the first form of pop music truly to
bear the imprint of post-’60s America, with a fan base
that is young and integrated. Indeed, the coalition of
youth that helped Barack Obama ride to the presidency
was first assembled by hip-hop record execs. And the
stars that the music has produced wear their hair
however they please.

For all of Malcolm’s invective, his
most seductive notion was that of collective
self-creation: the idea that black people could, through
force of will, remake themselves. Toward the end of his
book, Marable tells the story of Gerry Fulcher, a white
police officer, who—almost against his will—fell under
Malcolm’s sway. Assigned to wiretap Malcolm’s phone,
Fulcher believed Malcolm to be “one of the bad guys,”
interested in killing cops and overthrowing the
government. But his views changed. “What I heard was
nothing like I expected,” said Fulcher. “I remember
saying to myself, ‘Let’s see, he’s right about that … He
wants [blacks] to get jobs. He wants them to get
education. He wants them to get into the system. What’s
wrong with that?’” For black people who were never given
much of an opportunity to create themselves apart from a
mass image of shufflers and mammies, that vision had
compelling appeal.

What gave it added valence was
Malcolm’s own story, his incandescent transformation
from an amoral wanderer to a hyper-moral zealot. “He had
a brilliant mind. He was disciplined,” Louis Farrakhan
said in a speech in 1990, and went on:

I never saw Malcolm
smoke. I never saw Malcolm take a drink ... He ate one
meal a day. He got up at 5 o’clock in the morning to say
his prayers . . . I never heard Malcolm cuss. I never
saw Malcolm wink at a woman Malcolm was like a clock.

Farrakhan’s sentiments are echoed by
an FBI informant, one of many who, by the late 1950s,
had infiltrated the Nation of Islam at the highest
levels:

Brother Malcolm . .
. is an expert organizer and an untiring worker . . . He
is fearless and cannot be intimidated . . . He has
most of the answers at his fingertips and should be
carefully dealt with. He is not likely to violate any
ordinances or laws. He neither smokes nor drinks and is
of high moral character.

In fact, Marable details how Malcolm
was, by the end of his life, perhaps evolving away from
his hyper-moral persona. He drinks a rum and Coke and
allows himself a second meal a day. Marable suspects he
carried out an affair or two, one with an 18-year-old
convert to the Nation. But in the public mind, Malcolm
rebirthed himself as a paragon of righteousness, and
even in Marable’s retelling he is obsessed with the
pursuit of self-creation. That pursuit ended when
Malcolm was killed by the very Muslims from whom he once
demanded fealty.

But the self-created, martially
disciplined Malcolm is the man who lives on. The past 40
years have presented black America through the
distorting prism of crack, crime, unemployment, and
skyrocketing rates of incarceration. Some of its most
prominent public faces—Michael Jackson, Mike Tyson, Al
Sharpton, Jesse Jackson, O. J. Simpson—have in varying
degrees proved themselves all too human. Against that
backdrop, there is Malcolm. Tall, gaunt, and handsome,
clear and direct, Malcolm was who you wanted your son to
be. Malcolm was, as Joe Biden would say, clean, and he
took it as his solemn, unspoken duty never to embarrass
you.

Among organic black conservatives,
this moral leadership still gives Malcolm sway. It’s his
abiding advocacy for blackness, not as a reason for
failure, but as a mandate for personal, and ultimately
collective, improvement that makes him compelling.
Always lurking among Malcolm’s condemnations of white
racism was a subtler, and more inspiring, notion—“You’re
better than you think you are,” he seemed to say to us.
“Now act like it.”

Ta-Nehisi Coates
is a senior editor for The Atlantic, where he
writes about culture, politics, and social issues for
TheAtlantic.com and the magazine. He is the author of
the memoir The Beautiful Struggle

One of the
more philistine critiques of Malcolm X holds that he
"never did anything." You hear this often among people
who believe that the only way to understand Malcolm is
to compare him to Martin Luther King who "did things." I
think this misses the incredible
cultural revolution that's overtook black America in the
60s, 70s and 80s.

In my
new piece for the magazine I argue that
that revolution has spread to the entire country, so
much so that it laid the groundwork for a president with
an African name. For as surely as 2008 was made possible
by black people's long fight to be publicly American, it
was also made possible by those same Americans' long
fight to be publicly black. Put simply, Malcolm X is all
around us in ways that we now take as normal.

To illustrate that
point I reached past Malcolm to someone a little closer
to home...

When my mother was
12, she walked from the projects of West Baltimore to
the beauty shop at North Avenue and Druid Hill, and for
the first time in her life, was relaxed. It was 1962.
Black, bespectacled, skinny, and buck-toothed, Ma was
also considered to have the worst head of hair in her
family. Her tales of home cosmetology are surreal. They
feature a hot metal comb, the kitchen stove, my
grandmother, much sizzling, the occasional nervous
flinch, and screaming and scabbing.

In the ongoing
quest for the locks of Lena Horne, a chemical relaxer
was an agent of perfection. It held longer than hot
combs, and with more aggression—virtually every strand
could be subdued, and would remain so for weeks. Relying
on chemistry instead of torque and heat, the relaxer
seemed more worldly, more civilized and refined.

That day, the
hairdresser donned rubber gloves, applied petroleum
jelly to protect Ma's scalp, stroked in a clump of lye,
and told my mother to hold on for as long as she could
bear. Ma endured this ritual every three to four weeks
for the rest of her childhood. Sometimes, the beautician
would grow careless with the jelly, and Ma's scalp would
simmer for days. But on the long walk home, black boys
would turn, gawk, and smile at my mother's hair made
good.

Ma went off to
college, leaving the house of my grandmother, a onetime
domestic from Maryland's Eastern Shore who had studied
nursing in night school and owned her own home. This was
1969. Martin Luther King Jr. was dead. Baltimore had
exploded in riots. Ma hung a poster of Huey Newton in
her dorm room. She donated clothes at the Baltimore
office of the Black Panthers. There, she met my father,
a dissident of strong opinions, modest pedigree, and ill
repute. In the eyes of my grandmother, their
entanglement was heretical, a rejection of the workhorse
ethos of colored people, which had lifted my grandmother
out of the projects and delivered her kids to college.
The impiety was summed up in a final preposterous act
that a decade earlier would have been inconceivable—my
mother, at 20, let her relaxer grow out, and cultivated
her own natural, nappy hair.

Ta-Nehisi Coates,
born in
1975, the product of two beautiful parents. Raised in
West Baltimore, not quite The Wire, but
sometimes ill all the same. Studied at the Mecca for
some years in the mid-90s. Emerged with a purpose, if
not a degree. Slowly migrated up the East Coast with a
baby and my beloved, until I reached the shores of
Harlem. Wrote some stuff along the way.

Every work
reflects, consciously or unconsciously, a philosophical
framework within which it is rooted, conceived and
carried out, no matter what claims are made about
objectivity and detached critical analysis, and Manning
Marable's recent, posthumously published and problematic
book on the life of Min. Malcolm X, El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz,
is not exempt from this rule or reality. Indeed,
Marable's work and the subsequent controversy of
denunciation and praise which surrounds it raises larger
questions beyond the book about how we understand,
interpret and write history. It also raises interrelated
questions of how we address the tendency of so many
Black intellectuals to embrace the deconstructionist
approach to history and humanities writing, pursuing
criticism as an act of faith and revelation of the
unseemly as proof of progress toward "humanizing"
persons thought to be in need of it.

Clearly,
deconstructive writing as critical analysis is to be
embraced and encouraged, but deconstructionism in its
most negative forms can easily degenerate into
collecting and musing over trivia, trash and other
extraneous information whose sensationalist character
becomes a substitute for things relevant and more
intellectually rewarding. Indeed, it becomes little more
than the passionate pursuit of racialized pathology by
another name. And, at its worst, it takes the form of
"scavenger history," the constant search for stench and
stain, bottom feeding on the salacious, unseemly and
sensational. This leads to pretensions and claims of
revealing new material and offering original insights
into things found earlier by others and rejected as
uninstructive and unuseful to a more disciplined and
rigorous scholarship. . . .

Pursuing the
deconstructionist popular culture path, Marable situates
Malcolm in the folk tradition of Black outlaws and
dissidents, not the tradition of master teacher and
moral leader. He assigns to this list Gabriel Prosser,
Nat Turner, Stagger Lee, blues guitarist Robert Johnson,
and catering to the hip-hop constituency, rapper Tupac
Shakur. A few lines down we discover he is not talking
about Malcolm, but rather Detroit Red. This too is a
problem of his portrayal of Malcolm, the collapsing of
Detroit Red with Malcolm X, refusing to accept the
radical rupture Malcolm makes to reconstruct himself as
a more worthy and world-historical person and a
continuously unfolding human possibility. This is the
audacious agency that appealed even to President Obama
in his search for an African anchor for his identity,
purpose and direction, and is the basis of Malcolm's
durability as a model of African and human excellence
and achievement among his people.

Marable tells us
that he and his researchers and perhaps co-writers of
sections, wanted to humanize Malcolm, a kind of saving
him from his "manufactured" self and from the alleged
mythological conceptions of him hosted and harbored by
those too appreciative of Malcolm to see his flaws. But
it is important to know what these "humanizers" really
mean by this self-assigned and sanctimonious sounding
mission of humanizing Malcolm. In such a conception, the
flaws are the defining feature of Malcolm's being human
and his excellence assumes a secondary role and
relevance.

Malcolm expressed a
myriad of flaws, but Marable believes he exaggerated
some and left out others, and he must set the historical
record straight, assigning him flaws which cater to or
coincide with current tastes and talk, disrobing and
redressing him in costumes of assumed audience and
publisher and PR preference. Thus, Marable dismisses
Malcolm's pre-Muslim serious juvenile and adult lumpen
life, downgrading it as lumpen lite. He pursues his
deconstructive argument against available evidence by
characterizing Malcolm's pre-Muslim life of crime as a
thief, robber, numbers runner, dope-dealer, pimp,
panderer and burglar by terming it "amateurish,"
"clumsy," and "ridiculous," and calling his crime
partners "a motley crew."

In addition, he tells us that pre-Muslim Malcolm's
efforts to shield his younger brother from lumpen life,
"suggests he was never himself a hardened criminal."
It's like arguing a mafia member, shielding his son from
his business or a pimp protecting his daughter from
prostitution makes them less lumpen, i.e., less
committed to crime. It is such specious speculation and
repeated misreading of Malcolm in too many places that
calls to mind a diligent but mistaken scholar trying to
translate a Swahili text with a Zulu dictionary.

Marable subtitled
the book
A Life of Reinvention
in part because Malcolm X acknowledged mistakes and
transformed and transcended himself, from street hustler
and convict to black separatist of fierce anti-white
opinions to political and social activist seeking to
work with all races, worldwide. His marriage, however,
was widely seen as steady, close and supportive,
especially as dramatized by Denzel Washington and Angela
Bassett in Spike Lee's movie Malcolm X. Shabazz herself would remember her
years with Malcolm as "hectic, beautiful and
unforgettable—the greatest thing in my life."

Malcolm X married Betty Sanders, a nurse and fellow
member of the Nation of Islam, in 1958. They had six
children. According to the book, the marriage was often
tense, in part because of Malcolm's wish to have a
traditional, subservient Muslim wife and because he was
away so often and his life was often threatened. There
were problems of emotional and physical intimacy.
Marable includes a letter from Malcolm to Nation of
Islam leader Elijah Muhammad that offers a blunt account
of their home life, with Malcolm reporting that his wife
believed they were "incompatible sexually." Malcolm also
tells Muhammad that Betty had threatened to "seek
satisfaction elsewhere."

Marable writes that Betty became involved in 1964 with
Charles Kenyatta, a close associate of Malcolm's.
Malcolm, too, may have had affairs, although the
evidence is uncertain. He knew of the relationship
between his wife and Kenyatta, according to the book,
and "the news of infidelity seems to have loosened
Malcolm's own marital bonds."

Malaak Shabazz said there "may have been a little bit of
stress, like any marriage," but that "there was really
no times for shenanigans. She raised the children at
home; he worked on a global level."

Gratuitous,
non-defensive violence, in Malcolm’s NOI talks, always
came from the hand of Allah. Malcolm never rejected the
right of self-defense; otherwise, he would not have
become Malcolm the icon. Marable knew this, so he again
invades Malcolm’s mind (page 302). “By embracing the
ballot, he was implicitly rejecting violence, even if
this was at times difficult to discern in the heat of
his rhetoric.”

What kind of
violence was Malcolm rejecting? Certainly, not defensive
violence. And Malcolm had never publicly urged Blacks to
commit unprovoked aggressions against whites. The
purpose of Marable’s sentence can only be to show
alleged movement by Malcolm toward some state of
non-volatility, which we are expected to associate with
political moderation: reform.

Marable grows so
bold in pushing his back-to-the-future reformist
fantasies, by page 333 he describes a Malcolm X who has
become “race-neutral.” On May 21, 1964, Malcolm spoke at
Chicago’s Civic Opera House, telling a crowd of 1,500
people, “Separation is not the goal of the Afro-America,
nor is integration his goal. They are merely methods
toward his real end – respect as a human being.” Malcolm
went on the say: “Unless the race issue is quickly
settled, the 22 million American Negroes could easily
adopt the guerilla tactics of other deprived
revolutionaries.” Not that he necessarily advocated
that. (wink)

Three days before
he was assassinated, Malcolm said, “I’m man enough to
tell you that I can’t put my finger on exactly what my
philosophy is now.” But, not to worry, Dr. Marable has
the vision and the answer. He concluded that Malcolm had
“made his race-neutral views clear in Chicago….” There
is no rational basis for Marable’s amazing
interpretation, other than he thought it moved his
political story line on Malcolm’s evolution (or
race-neutralization) forward.

The opposite of
race-neutral, Malcolm lived and died a Race-Man, meaning
simply that he put the Race first. As he wrote to an
Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood luminary who was
disappointed that Malcolm was so decidedly
non-race-neutral, “As a black American, I do feel that
my first responsibility is to my twenty-two million
fellow black Americans” (page 368). . . .

Marable risks
making himself look stupid simply to make the intended
point that Malcolm and his Black Nationalism and
self-determination talk are passé and should be
dismissed except as historical artifacts. For Marable
and his Black left Obamites, Malcolm’s only other use is
to somehow authenticate today’s reformers—and even
President Obama!—as heirs to yesterday’s revolutionary
Black nationalists. This is the purpose put to Malcolm
by
Peniel Joseph, the Tufts University professor of
history and author of
Dark Days, Bright Nights: From Black Power to Barack
Obama, which attempts to draw a straight-line historical
connection between Malcolm X and the corporate
politician in the White House.

Manning Marable was
up to the same trick. “Given the election of Barack
Obama,” Marable writes on page 486, “it now raises the
question of whether blacks have a separate political
destiny from their white fellow citizens.” He does not
explain why Black destinies have changed just because a
Black Democrat who raised more corporate money than the
Republican won a presidential election. How did that
electoral fact entwine Black/white destinies in ways
that did not previously exist? How were the Black masses
empowered by Obama’s victory, and if they were somehow
empowered, why would that draw them closer to whites?

It would have been
better for Marable to have left out his last chapter of
Reflections – it reflected badly on his powers of
reasoning.

Finally, Marable
attempts to create artificial space between Malcolm X
and his direct political progeny, the Black Panther
Party for Self Defense. On page 403 he wrote:

“Had Malcolm
continued to mainstream his views, it is unclear how he
would have negotiated relations a few years later with
the Black Panthers, a group born of much of the
intellectual framework Malcolm had assembled in the
early to mid-1960s.”

It is nearly
impossible to conceive of a Black Panther Party had
there not been a Malcolm X. Marable insults a generation
of Blacks that came into political consciousness in the
Sixties—a cohort to which he chronologically belonged.
He substitutes his imagined, inferred, reinterpreted
Malcolm for the man whose words and bearing called forth
and virtually sculpted the youthful Party that debuted
in the year following his death. Marable projects
Malcolm as if he would be a stranger to the Panthers,
with whom he would have to “negotiate,” when Malcolm’s
life tells us it is far more likely that the emergence
of a militant revolutionary nationalist youth movement
that spoke his language – because they learned it
largely from him – would compel Malcolm to take the
struggle to an even “higher level.”

I am pleased that
Karl Evens and Zak Kondo, two biographers of Malcolm X,
are speaking up and offering accurate critiques of
Manning Marable’s new twisted biography of Malcolm X.
They are defending Malcolm’s legacy, as Karl Evens put
it, as “a Black Panther of a Man.” Manning’s book is a
second assassination along the lines of
Bruce Perry’s previous hatchet job and
George Breitman’s attempt to move Malcolm from his
ideological positions. In Marable’s bio we get a two for
one attempt to move Malcolm from being a powerful black
nationalist into a more academy friendly anti-racist
social justice activist. Dangerous to no one but perfect
for a liberal left academic establishment.

The only two books on Malcolm I can remember receiving
in-depth New York Times reviews where Manning's and
Bruce Perry's. Both were applauded by the Times, and
both were meant to reinvent Malcolm and undermine his
stature as the fountainhead of modern Black Nationalism.
Breitman began the legacy of attempting to re-position
Malcolm with his commentary on Malcolm’s shift to the
socialist camp by picking individual statements and
extrapolating their “true” meaning, which of course
tended to be close to the writers ideological position.
In Perry’s bio Malcolm sets his own house on fire, he
introduces the first claim of Malcolm’s newly discovered
sexual habits and tells us how psychologically
unbalanced Malcolm was. . . .

When biographers
replace their own ideology and wish list for their
subjects they are no longer scholars but propagandists
who speak through their subjects. The attempt to kill
Malcolm again by “making him human” then re-packaging
his ideas into the author’s version of a “mature” person
is the most disdainful.

Marable claims
Obama is part of Malcolm’s legacy. Really? Malcolm
supported the bombing of Africa? He supported the
continued embargo on Cuba? Free-trade zones? (Malcolm
may not have yet been a socialist, but he was clearly
anti-capitalist). Reliance on the two party system to
solve the problems of African people in the United
States? Malcolm spoke about black self-determination,
not integration. Malcolm worked openly and actively to
improve the collective lives of Black people, devise
closer links to Africa and to bring the United States
government up on charges before the United Nations, as
he said not to bring the case to the criminal (civil
rights) but to bring the criminal to court (human
rights). This is our Malcolm, the real one.

Kamau K.
Franklin is an activist attorney and a leading
member of the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement. He is the
former co-chair of the National Conference of Black
Lawyers and a past member of the Executive Committee of
the National Lawyers Guild.

As a former
professional researcher (I worked in the news research
department of The Washington Post for more than a
decade), I immediately recognized Marable’s fraud, one
of many in this pedestrian publication.

The late professor
uncovers no significant new material, yet he has the
chutzpah to dismiss with a flick of his wrist earlier
books about Malcolm’s life and assassination:

In reading
“all [emphasis supplied] of the literature about Malcolm
produced in the 1990s, I was struck by its shallow
character and lack of original sources (p. 490).”

When I began
reading Chapter 7, I felt like I was revisiting my
biography of Elijah Muhammad. It deals with marital
discord between Nation of Islam leader Elijah Muhammad
and Clara Muhammad. The chapter’s first four pages read
like a “reinvention” of chapters from The Messenger,
published by Pantheon Books in 1999. I checked the
footnotes for those four pages and noticed that seven of
the first ten cite The Messenger as the source
(p. 521).

Why didn’t Marable
use the original source material? He makes no mention of
the FBI’s national and Chicago files on Clara Muhammad.

Marable has two
primary arguments: (1) the intelligence community and
the New York Police Department deliberately ignored
serious threats against Malcolm’s X life, and (2) there
is overwhelming evidence that the five assassins came
from the Nation of Islam’s Newark mosque. That’s it.

Marable had
hundreds of thousands of dollars at his disposal for
more than a decade. He had over twenty researchers at
his disposal. Given far less capital and manpower, both
David J. Garrow and Taylor Branch separately produced
three-volume works of encyclopedic detail on Malcolm’s
contemporary, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Despite his
acknowledgments of gratitude to other prominent
researchers and benefactors, Marable’s book is a single
volume with questionable documentation.

Poor exposition and
inexcusable typographical errors taint the book. When I
communicated with Marable last June regarding a
statement obtained from Linward X Cathcart by New York
police after the assassination, his reply referred to
“Linwood” Cathcart. I advised him of the misspelling and
cautioned him to check his manuscript for the mistake.

One of his
assistants replied under his name and told me that
Marable dictated his responses for her to relay. She
blamed herself for misspelling the name and assured me
that the book had the proper spelling. There are two
references to Cathcart’s full name in the book, and both
times the name is spelled Linwood (p. 5, 452).It is also
misspelled in the index.

In the prologue,
Marable describes Malcolm X’s memoir as a “cautionary
tale about human waste and the tragedies produced by
racial segregation (p. 9).” Human waste? As in feces and
urine?

“No man has more
accurately described and analyzed the existential,
political, social, moral and spiritual plight of a
victimized people than has Malcolm X in this book,” an
objective reviewer wrote about the Autobiography of
Malcolm X.

A Life of Reinvention, by contrast, is immediately
forgettable. It was written by a chronic pen pusher who
lived a rather unremarkable middle class existence but
nonetheless implies that Malcolm X was an amateur this
or a mediocre that.

“I’m the man you
think you are,” Malcolm X said. Malcolm X was at the top
of the class in school, on top of the hustling game
during his hoodlum years, and a hell raiser in prison.
He was national spokesman for a black organization that
barely functioned before he joined in 1952. He was,
finally, a revolutionary known and respected by other
prominent revolutionaries—Fidel Castro, Ben Bella, and
Che Guevara, to name a few.

He was, in short, a
black panther of a man. By contrast, Marable was just
another paper tiger.

Karl Evanzz
is the author of three books, including an investigative
look at the assassination of Malcolm X,
The Judas Factor: The Plot to Kill Malcolm X. He is the
coauthor of Dancing with the Devil with hip-hop
artist Mark Curry. His next book will be published in
May.

Malcolm X’s life
has inspired filmmakers, writers, painters, rappers and
dramatists, yet much about his murder has remained a
mystery. Now we have Manning Marable’s “Malcolm
X,”a groundbreaking piece of work. Marable, a
historian who died on the eve of this book’s
publication, convinced people who had been silent for
decades to sit for interviews. He also drew upon oral
histories, dusty police reports and FBI and CIA
documents. The result is not just a biography, but also
a history of Muslims in America and a sweeping account
of one man’s transformation—and of the conspiracy,
abetted by police inattention, that took his tumultuous
life. The tension toward book’s end—when Malcolm was
trying to figure out who might murder him—is so gripping
it nearly soaks through the pages. . . .

Two incidents, in
addition to Elijah Muhammad’s infidelities, exacerbated
the split between Malcolm X and Muhammad. The first came
in 1962, when
Ronald Stokes, an unarmed Muslim who was a friend of
Malcolm’s, was shot and killed by Los Angeles policemen
in a parking lot. Malcolm wanted revenge, but Muhammad
urged against it. Malcolm eventually joined with L.A.
civil rights leaders to protest police brutality, a move
that infuriated Muhammad. The second, more serious
incident came in the aftermath of President Kennedy’s
assassination. Malcolm tried to blame the killing on
U.S. military violence abroad; Kennedy’s death, he said,
was an example of “the chickens coming home to roost.”
Muhammad was livid. He believed that the authorities
would strike back at black Muslims, particularly those
in prison, for Malcolm’s words. He suspended Malcolm,
and the suspension led to a convulsive split, with
Malcolm eventually forming his own organizations. . . .

My only criticism
of the book is that Marable did not tell us enough about
Malcolm’s family in the years following his death. That
family has suffered much pain. In 1995,
Qubilah, one of Malcolm’s daughters, was charged
with hiring a hit man to murder
Louis Farrakhan, who had sided with Muhammad during
the Malcolm contretemps. The case fell apart in court.
Malcolm’s widow, Betty Shabazz, died in 1997 from
injuries suffered in a house fire set by her grandson
Malcolm, Qubilah’s son.

It will be
difficult for anyone to better this book. It goes deeper
and richer than a mere homage to Malcolm X. It is a work
of art, a feast that combines genres skillfully:
biography, true-crime, political commentary. It gives us
Malcolm X in full gallop, a man who died for his belief
in freedom, a man whom Marable calls the “fountainhead”
of the black power movement in America.

In his review—a
shortened version of which he has
posted on his blog—[Karl] Evanzz challenges the quality of
Marable’s research and chides Marable for “scurrilous”
assertions about Malcolm X and people close to him.

But Evanzz said he
has no hard feelings toward the Root. “I didn’t spend
one minute worrying about them rejecting it, because I
expected it,” he said.

The dueling
appraisals of Marable’s book raise important questions
that deserve wider discussion, said
Jared Ball, an
associate professor of communications studies at Morgan
State University in Baltimore. He posted Evanzz’s review
on his blog and discussed the matter on his Friday
morning radio program on WPFW (89.3 FM) in the District.

“It’s a tough
situation,” Ball said in an interview. “On the one hand,
I greatly respect the career and work of Manning Marable.”
But “I think the issues [Evanzz] raises in terms of
research, scholarship, the claims of offering new
revelations are valuable. I think people should read
Marable’s book, read all the reviews, and go back and
read all the literature, including Evanzz’s book, and
see for themselves where the merit lies in Marable’s
book.”

Malcolm X
artifacts unearthed—Police docs and more found among
belongs of 'Shorty' Jarvis—1 February 2012—Documents
outlining the crime that landed Malcolm X in prison in
the 1940s are among some 1,000 recently unearthed items
purchased jointly by the civil rights leader's
foundation and an independent collector of
African-American artifacts. The documents and other
artifacts belonged to late musician Malcolm "Shorty"
Jarvis, who served in prison with Malcolm X and was one
of his closest friends. Jarvis' 1976 pardon paper also
is part of the collection, which was recently discovered
by accident. The items had been in a Connecticut storage
unit that had gone into default, and were initially
auctioned off to a buyer who had no idea what he was
bidding on. The Omaha, Nebraska-based Malcolm X Memorial
Foundation, which oversees the Malcolm X Center located
at his birthplace, will house and display the
just-arrived archives. It split the cost with Black
History 101 Mobile Museum, based in Detroit—the
birthplace of the Nation of Islam.—Mobile Museum founder
and curator Khalid el-Hakim declined to identify the
original buyer or the price the two organizations paid
for the trove. Still, even after splitting the cost, he
said it's the largest acquisition to date for his mobile
museum, which includes Jim Crow-era artifacts, a Ku Klux
Klan hood and signed documents by Malcolm X and Rosa
Parks. . . . The collection also reveals an enduring
connection between the two Malcolms after their
incarceration, Malcolm X's conversion to Islam and his
rise to prominence. There's a 72-page scrapbook of
Malcolm X's life that was maintained by Jarvis until
after his friend's 1965 assassination. One of the civil
rights era's most controversial and compelling figures,
Malcolm X rose to fame as the chief spokesman of the
Nation of Islam, a movement started in Detroit more than
80 years ago. He proclaimed the black Muslim
organization's message at the time: racial separatism as
a road to self-actualization and urged blacks to claim
civil rights "by any means necessary" and referred to
whites as "devils."—TheGrio

Years
in the making-the definitive biography of
the legendary black activist.

Of the great figure in twentieth-century
American history perhaps none is more
complex and controversial than Malcolm X.
Constantly rewriting his own story, he
became a criminal, a minister, a leader, and
an icon, all before being felled by
assassins' bullets at age thirty-nine.
Through his tireless work and countless
speeches he empowered hundreds of thousands
of black Americans to create better lives
and stronger communities while establishing
the template for the self-actualized,
independent African American man. In death
he became a broad symbol of both resistance
and reconciliation for millions around the
world.

Manning Marable's
new biography of Malcolm is a stunning achievement.
Filled with new information and shocking revelations
that go beyond the Autobiography, Malcolm X unfolds a
sweeping story of race and class in America, from the
rise of Marcus Garvey and the Ku Klux Klan to the
struggles of the civil rights movement in the fifties
and sixties.

Reaching into
Malcolm's troubled youth, it traces a path from his
parents' activism through his own engagement with the
Nation of Islam, charting his astronomical rise in the
world of Black Nationalism and culminating in the
never-before-told true story of his assassination.
Malcolm X will stand as the definitive work on one of
the most singular forces for social change, capturing
with revelatory clarity a man who constantly strove, in
the great American tradition, to remake himself anew.

Pulitzer Prize for
History 2012 Winner—For a distinguished and
appropriately documented book on the history of
the United States, Ten thousand dollars
($10,000). Awarded to Malcolm X: A Life of
Reinvention, by the late Manning Marable
(Viking), an exploration of the legendary life
and provocative views of one of the most
significant African-Americans in U.S. history, a
work that separates fact from fiction and blends
the heroic and tragic. (Moved by the Board from
the Biography category.)—

Carew, an
activist, scholar, and journalist, met Malcolm X
during his last trip abroad only a few weeks before
he was killed in 1965. It made such an impression on
Carew that he felt compelled to search out Malcolm's
family and friends in order to flesh out the family
history. He interviewed Wilfred (Malcolm's older
brother) and a Grenadian friend of Malcolm's mother
named Tanta Bess. Comparing his family's experiences
with that of Malcolm X, he gives the most complete
picture yet of Malcolm's mother. Carew also offers a
tantalizing glimpse of Malcolm X's transforming
himself into El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz, a man less
blinded by his own racial prejudices yet as
committed to the betterment of his race as ever.
Just before his death, Malcolm X became convinced
that a U.S. agency was involved with those trying to
kill him, and Carew here reveals the evidence
Malcolm X gave him to support these beliefs. The
mystery of Malcolm's death remains unresolved, and
we are once again filled with regret that he was cut
down before he could fulfill the promise of his
later days. While this book will not replace The
Autobiography of Malcolm X (LJ 1/1/66), it is an
important supplement. All libraries that own the
autobiography should also purchase this one.—Library
Journal